France Faces a Colonial Legacy

What Makes Someone French?

by Craig S. Smith

PARIS, Nov. 10 - Semou Diouf, holding a pipe in one hand and a cigarette in
the other, stood amid the noisy games of checkers and cards in the dingy
ground-floor common room of a crowded tenement building and pondered the
question of why he feels French.

"I was born in Senegal when it was part of France," he said before putting
the pipe in his mouth. "I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated
in France." The problem, he added after pulling the pipe out of his mouth
again, "is the French don't think I'm French."

That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept
France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether
immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional
French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in
fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains
rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant
portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic
makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a
baguette-and-beret affair.

Though many countries aspire to ensure equality among their citizens and
fall short, the case is complicated in France by a secular ideal that
refuses to recognize ethnic and religious differences in the public domain.
All citizens are French, end of story, the government insists, a lofty
position that, nonetheless, has allowed discrimination to thrive.

France's Constitution guarantees equality to all, but that has long been
interpreted to mean that ethnic or religious differences are not the purview
of the state. The result is that no one looks at such differences to track
growing inequalities and so discrimination is easy to hide. . . .